Text in and out of school – a dialogical rhetorical analysis

Abstract

Young people’s school texts and young people’s literacy practices are starting to get well explored. However, young people’s texts from out of school, and the relations between school and leisure time in young people’s textual utterances, are largely under-researched. Reading and analyzing young people’s texts from in and out of school can give a new angle to address this question of gaps and bridges. The present article gives an analysis of two texts from in and out of school by a fifteen year old boy, with the research questions concerned with how different texts and contexts produce different conditions for expressing oneself, and how a young writer answers to these through his texts. The analysis draws on terms from dialogism and rhetoric. The analysis shows that while the texts analyzed answer to different exigences in school and free time, the writer also to some extent uses similar textual strategies in his answering work.

Keywords

• writing out of school
• dialogism
• rhetorical situation
• text analysis
• student texts